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Posted by James Sturges on October 29, 2012 at 12:21 pm. Comments Off on Balsamiq Wireframes Quickstart Guide

One of my favorite tools for making design and UI/UX wire frames is Balsamiq mockups. I know I’ve mentioned this tool many times before and referred to it in presentations, but it really is an awesome tool. I made a simple template in another post for making SharePoint mockups you can download here.

Packt Publishing just released a pretty slick book titled Balsamiq Wireframes Quickstart Guide by Scott Faranello. I’ve been reviewing the book and it’s a great reference for everything from installing the software to file formats, custom objects, design best practices, and more! It’s definitely worth checking out if you need to make wire frame mockups for user interface design or custom look and feel, in SharePoint and other applications.

You can get the book as an eBook or in hard copy online, as well as book reviews and topics covered on the Packt Publishing book page here.

Book Approach (from Packt Publishing):“This book is a step-by-step guide to learning Balsamiq Mockups and wireframing in general. Written in an engaging, easy to follow style and flow, readers can utilize free, downloadable templates that teach by building upon previous chapters until each lesson is learned and applied, ensuring true learning, not just memorization.”

Who This Book is For:“If you are serious about wireframing, designing and communicating your ideas clearly and quickly, then this book is for you.”

Recently I had a request from a client to add a custom site collection column to all document libraries. This is pretty easy though the SharePoint UI of course, by creating a custom Site Column in the collection and adding it to the ‘Document’ content type.

However, in doing this the column is not added to the default view for any document libraries. This can be easily done using PowerShell using the script below. This adds the column to the default view in every document library throughout the entire site collection (referenced here).

Adding multiple columns to a view can also be done with PowerShell, and even create a new view and set it as the default view. This is really awesome if you want to leave the default ‘All Items’ view in tact, but create a new custom view and set it as default (found here):

Posted by James Sturges on August 17, 2012 at 11:53 am. Comments Off on FIM Client Location for User Profile Service Sync

As you might already know, setting up (and more importantly debugging) the User Profile Service synchronization can be a nightmare. This is one of those areas I was hoping to have improved in 2013, but it doesn’t look like it’s gotten much better.

If your User Profile Service Application isn’t synchronizing with Active Directory properly, there is a Windows Server client called FIM (Forefront Identity Manager) which you can use to view all the operations that occur during sync. Even more you can see the specific users who had profile updates, users who were removed, and users who were added and what properties were changed which is really helpful.

One word of caution: don’t change any of the sync properties or operations with the FIM client, it is not supported! Technically you can change how sync operations work but customizing them in the client will break the SharePoint UI for setting up sync configurations. Only change the sync mappings and configuration settings/filters through Central Administration.

One of the things I need to constantly reference in my day to day interactions with SharePoint are the various versions of the platform. This is especially helpful when performing upgrades or debugging content database versions and such during migrations.

Thus far I haven’t found a simple official chart by Microsoft on TechNet or otherwise that shows not only the version number for each SP version (although the latest versions are posted here). Even more, the few resources I’ve found only cover 2010 individually, and certainly not WSS/MOSS. However, Todd Carter has a brilliant blog post on all major SP versions for 2007 and 2010 I’ve referred to so many times I copied here below. I refer to it so much in fact that when he recently moved his blog and the page was unavailable for a day or so I was completely lost.

A big thanks to Todd for collecting this! I’ll try and keep it up to date with new releases as I hear about them. On a side note, at the time of this post (8/8/2012) I’ve been installing/recommending the February 2012 CU with SP1 for SharePoint 2010 although I’ve heard April refresh is great, I just have yet to try it.

Posted by James Sturges on June 7, 2012 at 8:50 am. Comments Off on Add Custom Words to SharePoint 2010 Spell Check

This was a unique one, I had a client recently who utilized SharePoint 2010 for their internal corporate intranet. In my mind one of the best uses for SharePoint, although every time they typed their company name SharePoint would say it was a misspelling!

Obviously it’s not ideal to see the red squiggly line every time you type your company name. Really, Microsoft should have build some kind of global dictionary term management system for adding words with an option to allow end users to add dictionary terms or admins only… but they didn’t. A quick hop around the community found me this great article by Kathryn Ciaralli which did the trick.

You in fact can add custom terms to your SharePoint dictionary! Unfortunately this solution is only per each site collection, but you can setup publishing jobs to keep everything in sync I suppose. To add custom terms to your SharePoint spell check dictionary, do the following for each site collection:

Create a document library at the root site level for your site collection called ‘Spelling’.

Create a .txt file on your computer with the custom terms you’d like to add to the dictionary – add one term per line. When you’re done, save it as “Custom Dictionary.txt”.

Upload the Custom Dictionary.txt file to the new Spelling document library. Bing! Custom terms added to your site collection dictionary, one and done. Simple as that.